Wednesday, May 20, 2009

The conference that met with hindrances for almost two years finally took place today. The turnout was even better than expected, and when the organizer, Roberta Kowalishin, asked people to raise hands as to who was business/technical, cloud novice/intermediate/professional, we saw that all sectors were equally represented.

The part most interesting to me was the panel discussion between Google, Oracle, SalesForce, and BMC leaders.

Scott Perry of Google/Postini said he envied the young start-ups he is seeing today. When he started Postini in 1999, they had to raise the capital of $11M to buy the infrastructure: SUN servers, Oracle databases, and the other expensive components just to start. Now, he said, he envies them who don't need any capital and can create a complete virtual company in the cloud. Everything is outsourced: payroll, CRM, but most importantly the computing power. VC's will be the last to get the new paradigm, because the startups don't need to be capitalized as before.

Equally interesting, though in a different way, was Marc Settle, CIO of BMC. They tried, he said, to dabble into the cloud, but due to various problems with applications and personnel those projects were killed. Thus, BMC could not move into the cloud, although 25% of its applications is delivered as SAAS. Thus, he was somewhat of a counter-example. However, he said that should he be starting a new start-up of 50 people, he would put everything into the cloud and have no infrastructure resources of his own.

Oracle's Bill Hodak explained Oracle's cloud strategy: enabling their software offerings to run in other clouds and help customers run their existing applications in the cloud. An Oracle database on an EC2 server can be provisioned in 10 minutes. But, they don't run their own cloud. As my own speculation, this may very well change with the acquisition of SUN, which includes both SUN server business and the SUN cloud initiative. In fact, SUN grid was one of the first in the industry, but got held up for two years by government regulations. Now Oracle may well take advantage of this work already done – but Oracle is notoriously silent about their plans for SUN.

Davi Levitt of SalesForce.com talked about their 100,00 customers building applications on top of their platform. And he did not mean CRM, but other custom company apps, which they then roll out for tens of thousands of company users.

A funny altercation between SalesForce and Postini occurred when SalesForce's Dave claimed to be the grand-daddy of cloud computing, but Postini/Google Scott vigorously objected.

The overall impression? Despite the significant steps into the cloud (and we are talking about vendors with vested interest), the hype is still on, and the desire to claim first titles is obvious, because the potential is enormous.

A. There is more than one correct answer to the questions below. Tech-centered questions are important, but so are questions that probe a candidate's legal knowledge.

What's the difference between an RFA and an RFP?

How many days does a party have to respond to a document request in your jurisdiction? State court? Federal court?

Are there any locally important issues, cases, or personalties with respect to e-discovery in your jurisdiction? What/who are they? (e.g. we appear> before J. Grimm);

Name one case that's important for electronic discovery and/or review, and explain why it's important;

What is the best evidence rule?

What is a third party subpoena?

What differences in approach to data collection, processing, and review, if any, are there when responding to a third-party subpoena and a subpoena in an active matter of your client's?

A partner calls you at 4:30 and says she has a floppy disc with half a dozen files to print before she leaves. You get to her office and find the "floppy" is a DVD and the files are 7 PSTs totalling 4 GB. What do you tell the partner?

What is spoliation?

How would you document the steps you took for a document production?

A lawyer says he has an SEC securities fraud case. The "client's IT guy" has already removed and sent the hard drive from the computer of a trader who recently left the client's firm under questionable circumstances. The lawyer wants your help "to take a look at" what's on the drive. What do you do and what do you tell him?

How would you explain slack space and unallocated space to an attorney who was techno-phobic?

At an overarching level, look at your own specific needs. Talk to the people doing the job already. Look back at help tickets or problems you've faced in the last month or two;

Don't denigrate an entire class of job applicants (e.g. "button pushers" and "load monkeys" [sic]) or go into an interview with a disdain for applicants who can't do X. The good applicants will pick up on that and won't want to work for you;

Don't get hung up on whether an applicant knows terms that are reasonably open to synonyms or alternate uses. In one state it may be RFPs and in another - "doc requests";

What to look for in a candidate? Willing and able to: adapt workflows to current context; learn just about anything quickly, preferably autodidactic; strong sense of personal accountability; handle stress well (ie: doesn't become a "crab in a basket").

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.

Monday, May 4, 2009

A lot of important and useful information is posted to litsupport each week. The following is a distilled summary, in the form of questions and answers.

Q. What are the possible approaches to "I want to redact now" need, and can one redact native documents?

A. The editors understand that the topic may be broader than what is addressed in this week's responses. Our goal is to accurately summarize the responses made without adding any material on our own. There are three approaches. We will use the term TIFF, but it applies equally to PDF.

TIFF everything up-front, keep it hidden in the database, and "turn it on" when you want to redact. It may be called "TIFF on demand," but in reality the TIFFs are there. The potential downsides are higher processing costs and larger database, which may slow down performance;

"Image on the fly" generates TIFF when needed, and one may have to wait while the document is generated, unless the vendor generates individual pages when viewed. Potential issues are documents that are hard to image, such as spreadsheets with pivot tables;

"Native redaction" are tools that overlay redactions over the native document, giving more flexibility and allowing to modify redactions. The potential problem to watch is that the coordinates of the redactions must be burned precisely into the image of the document on production.

Q. Should self-promotion with cartoons be allowed in the group, and can the cartoons be considered self-promotion?

A.

Pros: it is fun, and we need fun; we are all vendors here anyway, and litsupport staff too has to "sell" their services to their firms; we are all self-promoting, even a business card or a signature is self-promotion;

Cons: the rules of the group disallow direct promotion; the cartoons are too much pro-business; they are not directly related to the purpose of the group, there are also many buyers here.

This summary from the Litsupport Group postings created by the wonderful and talented members of the group has been culled by Mark Kerzner and edited by Aline Bernstein.